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Pearse Anderson on designers’ theft of digital textures that better emulate the physical world. He also made this on-theme Dirt logo.
Say you buy something used, like a van previously owned by hippies, and that thing is covered in old stickers. Your first instinct might be to scratch off the tacky decals and Goodwill barcodes from your purchase—but that’s the exact opposite of what the graphic design company BlkMarket does.
Their recent release stickers.zip II bundles 200 curated stickers, scanned for high enough quality to be added to your website, posters, printable materials, or even Canva document. BlkMarket is just one of several graphic design companies who aren’t marketing typefaces, palettes, or brushes, but instead grungy emulation files to make products made online look more real. And chasing after them is a community of pirates, organized to trade and use these grungy emulators. Welcome to the black market of the BlkMarket.
In recent years, audiences have shifted away from peak “Corporate Memphis” art styling, a design style known for bright colors, flat, geometric characters, and swaths of white space (see: Facebook, Google, AirTable). Such designs, oft associated with the basic millennial aesthetic, can feel so hygienic and utopian to the point of being unsettling and unreal. More and more, designers are creating websites, posters, social media posts that feel intentionally rooted in a location, rather than adrift in the polygonal whiteness of digitalia. That’s driven all sorts of quasi-analog emulation tools, from Bryan Delimata’s textures of rips, folds, and tape (marketed for music videos) to RetroSupply’s halftone shading (to achieve a midcentury comic effect). And although Black Friday is the best time to buy said tools, pirates are scooping them up for free whenever.
Many of these tools can be found on GFX Trading, a subreddit where designers meet to pass programs and tools to each other on backdoor Google Docs and pastelinks. There’s graveyards of deleted posts, reports of scams, and little community—it’s more digital alley than town hall, a place to scamper in and out of with the files. Usually, traders list what they own and what they’re searching for so that they can pay for a needed product with a digital copy of what they already have. Graphics traders even have a corner on a Drumkit Trading Discord, which is primarily a community of beat producers trading pirated drum samples to use in Soundcloud raps and YouTube instrumentals.
One GFX Trading pirate told Dirt that they justify the theft because “[t]here's no surefire way to know who's created what.” The scans of fabric, dust, and leaf clutter could be itself pirated!
“I see them differently to software, etc., as I simply do not know how much work went into them,” they continued. Emulators can feel like the 21st century version of follies, false constructions purpose-built to make the surrounding landscape feel more aged and nostalgic, but never rising to the acclaim of truly old buildings (see: Neuschwanstein). But that doesn’t mean they aren’t fantastic to look at and use, or worthy of the time designers poured into them. I’d take a Todd Pham poster over a Spotify Wrapped graphic anyday. In the graphic design world of Adobe’s price gouging and stagnating creative budgets, a cash-strapped designer might see burn effects or Trash Machine emulator as the first purchases to cut, or steal.
Misused textures can be traced back to their original creators, though it’s damning work. How do you prove some gritty pixels is your photograph of a subway floor, rather than someone else’s? Designer Judy A. Juracek recently asked for up to $12 million in damages from Capcom when she discovered (and deftly showed) how her textures were likely used without licensing. This winter, both parties “amicably resolved their dispute.” No prices were revealed.
Notably, this alleged misuse took place on PS2 releases from over 15 years ago. So check in on your graphic designer friends in 2040, because by that time they might be finding some pirated glass shatter imagery of theirs on a Kidz Bop 24: Best of Grunge album cover they can sue over. Or maybe they will have quit the industry entirely, the long tail of sales cut short, their work disrupted by AI emulation tools that can endlessly re-shatter glass. — Pearse Anderson